


digital witness

by peaksykid



Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen, also this is post-main plot of American Gods so. spoilers, can you tell i just really love media, its basically just a character study about Media, set more in the book!verse than the tv show but whatever, title is from the st. vincent song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 03:27:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11394414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: Media is a bit stressed out.





	digital witness

They said it was impossible for a New God to understand what it was like to be an Old God. They were too young, too reckless, didn’t have the strength of will or power of mind behind them that the ancients did. Didn’t have a history or stories powering them or anything in their past, really, not on a real temporal scale anyway. No hindsight. Only moved forward. In the eyes of the Old Gods, the new ones were unable to see consequences, only immediate instant gratification.

 

And yet, the reverse was also true.

 

There was no way an Old God could think so quickly, act on so short a time frame. On short notice, without consulting years of precedent, without reflecting on legend. The New Gods were the sum of the moments that made them up, and there were precious few in each. They had a lot less to work with, yet simultaneously a lot more. Wider reach but less experience. And there was no way for an Old God to live in the same sort of existential fear the New did.

 

There was a fear that ran deep in their bones, a fear of becoming obsolete. It ran everything they did, powered their every movement and reckless action. The Old Gods may have had to worry about fading out, but they didn’t die in these numbers, and this quickly. No legends? No past? Nothing holding you back from the void. So many of the New had fallen apart, never gotten off the ground. So many had merged into one another, been renamed and recreated, or just been lost to time. So many got themselves killed in stupid ways. And there was always another hungry being waiting to take your place if you ended up being one of the unlucky ones.

 

Media knew this all too well. She knew all about drama. About barriers to communication. About things that make it too hard to see eye to eye. She knew about looming dread. Usually she liked all that. Made for better TV. The more conflict, the more interesting things got. She liked to think there was a bit of the old Eris in her (although she knew for a fact Eris was dead, since she’d watched it all go down from a closed-circuit camera back in the day when Eris ran afoul of the Russian mafia. Discord, indeed.) But now she wasn’t sure.

 

She was one of the older ones, relatively. New Gods lived so short of lives on the scale of the Old Gods, or at least it seemed like they did at this point. After all, one hadn’t really survived to a natural fade-out lifespan before for anyone to be able to tell. There were a few older than her--Adam Capital, that filthy rich railroad bastard, for one--but she had stayed relatively the same through her existence. Not like the New of these days who shifted imagery every minute and every hour. As a result, she felt somewhere in the middle of it all. Certainly not Old (she hoped she wasn’t getting old--studio lights sometimes make your wrinkles show up worse) but an odd sort of New in any respect.

 

She did have a past, too. She used to have elder sisters. Well, not really sisters, more like predecessors. She wasn’t originally the leader of her aspect. Before she even existed there had been Radio, that silvery voice without a face, and there had been others before that who no one remembered. When she had first emerged, she’d been the silent-film girl, unable to speak a word. It took her time to learn to say lines, then make up her own, and of course, she _never_ stopped once she could. She learned the enticing power that voice and light combined had over the world, and like _hell_ she was gonna give that up. The others, going obsolete slowly, all ended up coalescing into her, this odd glittering screen-image of a goddess who thrived off attention and phosphor-dotted city skylines.

 

But she was beginning to wonder if she was really as stable as she once thought. She’d changed since she began--all New Gods do, of course, change is in their blood and bones and wiring--but she wasn’t sure if it was the _right_ sort of change, if she was going in the right direction. She was a Goddess of the present, not the future, and the fact that she _couldn’t_ see the future worried her. Didn’t know what was coming. Couldn’t.

 

She was much more wary nowadays about getting fooled. The war had shaken everybody up. Watching a bunch of gods die over a made-up conflict had shaken her up more than she realized. Not the ones she didn’t like, mind you, but she’d lost friends. She and all her anchors and actors and assorted TV-folk had piled into a few of those fancy cars the New Gods were always using and driven up to that damn mountain. It hadn’t even been an exciting battle, either. Just pointless. She still remembers seeing one of her girls stabbed through the chest on the spear of some strange Old centaur-being. Bleeding static and blue lights. And everyone saw, too. Because her camera was still going. Sometimes Media wished she didn’t have to archive everything she saw.

 

And there was so much more to archive nowadays. She was so busy. Back when she was first created--back when she was that silent girl of the silver screen--she had had no IDEA what a 24-hour-news-cycle would look like, how powerful the attention of the future would be, how fast everything would move. The digital age was more power than she’d ever imagined--and more stress than she’d ever imagined. This power, this multiplatform-ness, it had come with the price tag of sheer exhaustion. Sometimes she felt as if she would split in two.

 

And it didn’t help that these days, things were...hard, oddly enough. Harder than usual. More paid attention to her than ever (these things went in cycles, the more exciting all the news got the more people paid attention) but at the same time, people were angry with her. It wasn’t in the same way that someone could get angry at an Old God (although that’s never a good idea, picking fights with Old Gods) because no one ever spoke of her directly--that’s how it is with New Gods, these concept-people. They said her name, her title, but they didn’t mean her, and yet in some ways they did mean her but just didn’t realize it. Most of the time when they said her name it was to rail against her.

 

There was a tension in the static. In the silence on-air. You’d never be able to tell by looking at her, oh no, but inside her mind there were melting colorbars and flickering sounds and doubt. It was hard to keep that perfect smile while staring down the world on the other side of the camera. She was surprised, honestly, that she hadn’t cracked.

 

There were nights, there were times, when she remembered every bloody battle photographed by war correspondents, all the violence witnessed by closed-circuit cameras in prisons, the secrets surrendered by captured spies. Her eyes, after all, had seen every bit of it. Text scrolling by on thousands of chyrons, story headlines from every location on Earth. It was a good thing that gods didn’t sleep--she couldn’t have if she tried.

 

No one could see, though. She kept up the facade, she tried her very best to fake it. She was still smooth and silver and electric, her hair was still perfect, her smile still iconic. But it was shaky. After all, the world was a shaky place, nowadays. Everyone could feel it. 

 

She collected old bits of lost video, records from number stations, cut bits of tape. In a back room of her favorite TV station she kept a recording of the CNN Doomsday Video playing at all times. Just in case.

 

Maybe she was getting paranoid. She liked to think of it more as being prepared. It was all going to catch up to her at some point, wasn't it? It had to. 

 

The Old Gods had always said that the New Gods were pointless because they were too over-specific, too specialized. That none of them had the sheer amount of power that any of the Old did. The thing was, that wasn’t true. There was, in fact, a god, or goddess, or neither, above all the new gods, and it was the thing they feared most.

 

One of these days, it _would_ all catch up with her. One of these days, Entropy would call Media’s name. She had to be ready.

**Author's Note:**

> I think Media is really under appreciated as she is in the book, so I thought I'd write something for her. It doesn't fit as much with her character in the show, though, because of the timeline differences. But oh well. 
> 
> Also, the CNN Doomsday Video is a real thing. Look it up.


End file.
